Although How to Survive is definitely a thumbstick shooter staring everyone’s favourite nameless enemies, zombies, (they tied with Nazis) at times it has surprisingly good survival horror elements. There’s a dark gritty atmosphere that’s rarely, if ever, been realized in a thumbstick shooter in the way it has in How to Survive. Which I actually found a welcome change.
Unfortunately there comes a point where the fact that How to Survive is a thumbstick shooter gets in the way of it’s deeper survival horror aspirations. Surviving by needing to find food and water basically has to become a case of picking up items to keep a Sim like happiness meter topped up. It’s a bit of a shame really but I can imagine a game where a constant need for water is the main appeal could very quickly become boring and stressful.
There is a loose plot based structure that reminded me a lot of Dead Island. Not in substance but in essence. It’s the gameplay that keeps you coming back and the plot merely shuffles the whole thing along. The first Borderlands did the same thing and it can work wonders in the right place, luckily it feels right in How to Survive. Sometimes I don’t need anything more complicated than go and survive the horde. I’m here to kill zombies at the end of the day.
On your travels you will find a multitude of weapons and items to help you on your way. To introduce you to all these mechanics a very friendly chap named Kovac has left you various leaflets to help you learn your way around the island. Picking up one of Kovac’s guides will start a short animated video clip to guide you through the task at hand. They’re funny and light hearted. I genuinely looked forward to picking them up because they where funny. It’s great to see a tutorial with some fun and imagination infused into it. It certainly stops the tutorial becoming tedious.
There’s also a rather comprehensive level up system that keeps things interesting for quite a while. Unfortunately given the amount of time spent fighting off the horde the combat gets a little stale a little too fast. Melee weapons feature an amazingly singular motion that sees your chosen character blindly swinging with a stick to bop zombies. It looks strangely out of place for such a pretty game to have such poor animations.
OK so it’s a thumbstick shooter, I’m not expecting Uncharted quality motion capture. But at the same time surely it’s easy enough to make at least one convincing action for a zoomed out top-down-only view. A vast majority of How to Survive looks great and it’s a shame that an action you will spend so much time performing has been paid so little attention.
There are some surprisingly survival-horror-esque moments in How to Survive. Unfortunately they don’t carry through the full game. It’s possible that if the survival elements had been more prominent How to Survive could have been too hardcore and quickly become irritating. Looking at it the other way around How to Survive is a surprisingly deep and satisfying thumbstick shooter that makes a very good attempt at breaking free of the genre’s shackles. With more in-depth combat How to Survive would have simultaneously, and successfully, implemented new things whilst remaining true to the genre. Sadly I felt the combat and rigid character movements just stopped How to Survive from becoming something special.
Reviewed on PC.
